As I see it, even though the cartridge's end has both characters emoting out of every pore, Accomplice!'s essential project remains abstract and self-reflexive; we end up feeling and thinking not about the characters but about the cartridge itself. By the time the final repetitive image darkens to a silhouette and the credits roll against it and the old man's face stops spasming in horror and the boy shuts up, the cartridge's real tension becomes the question: Did Himself subject us to 500 seconds of the repeated cry 'Murderer!' for some reason, i.e. is the puzzlement and then boredom and then impatience and then excruciation and then near-rage aroused in the film's audience by the static repetitive final 1/3 of the film aroused for some theoretical-aesthetic end, or is Himself simply an amazingly shitty editor of his own stuff?

from David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

Today is the twenty-seventh of February. The time is 11:43 p.m. I, Karl Ove Knausgaard, was born in December 1968, and at the time of writing I am thirty-nine years old. I have three children -- Vanka, Heidi, and John -- and am in my second marriage, to Linda Boström Knausgaard. All four are asleep in the rooms around me, in an apartment in Malmö where we have lived for a year and a half. Apart from some parents of the children at Vanja and Heidi's nursery we do not know anyone here. This is not a loss, at any rate not for me, I don't get anything out of socializing anyway.

I never say what I really think, what I really mean, but always more or less agree with whomever I am talking to at the time, pretend that what they say is of interest to me, except when I am drinking, in which case more often than not I go too far the other way, and wake up to the fear of having overstepped the mark. This has become more pronounced over the years and can now last for weeks.

When I drink I also have blackouts and completely lose control of my actions, which are generally desperate and stupid, but also on occasion desperate and dangerous. That is why I no longer drink. I do not want anyone to get close to me, I do not want anyone to see me, and this is the way things have developed: no one gets close and no one sees me.

This is what must have engraved itself in my face, this is what must have made it so stiff and masklike and almost impossible to associate with myself whenever I happen to catch a glimpse of it in a shop window.

from Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle: Book One

It was supposed to say ‘Great Artist’ on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say ‘such a good teacher/daughter/friend’ instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL.

from Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs

Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t, “Is this a potential friend for me?” but, “Is this character alive?”

from Claire Messud's April 2013 interview with Publisher's Weekly

Aspirations

I am a writer, and as such, one would expect me to be able to articulate today (today, as in the date of one's expulsion from womb; today, as in the aura of our era) – one expects some fulfillment of my duty as Artist, for me to penetrate the collective psyche with the language it needs (deserves). 

But I refuse to be so audacious.

What I can do as a young writer, as an admirer of the better men who have done for me what I hope to someday do for you, is to remember how the day – like the day of the Boston bombings, like the days Christopher Dorner roamed the streets of the Inland Empire, like the day an English major killed thirty-two people in my state, like the three weeks in a gusty October during which a 17-year-old helped a 37-year-old kill ten people while elementary schools like mine refused to allow their children outside for more than ten minutes a day, like the day my mother turned 37 and planes fell out of the sky, like the day two high school seniors yelled, "One! Two! Three!" before blowing their brains out but after blowing thirteen other people's brains out – how the day made me.

Remember.

So when the day comes that I am capable of translating those moments into language, I'll be ready to serve the only justice I have to offer.

I think if I want a chance at love that is real and not just real enough, I need to figure out how to be real and not just real enough.

Destroyed by Sadness

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I Saw the Brightest Minds/Of My Generation

To the Child With the Star On His Head, From Death, With Love

everyone wishes for youth
how I have wasted my life
trusting the pleasure it gives here on Earth

are you afraid of growing too fast?

Dear Reader

Dear Reader Who Walked Into My Pie Shop With A Difficult Novel In Hand,

I asked you if it was Infinite Jest you were reading. You replied that it was. I asked you if it was your first time. You replied that it was. I expressed what must have a sheer excess amount of joy, glancing at your page and imagining how much as-yet-unseen beauty laid ahead of you in the pages to come. You asked me if I meant to say that I'd read it more than once. I replied I only wished that I had, as I'd been told that the novel was more than doubly powerful upon re-read. You said you loved his work, and I -- manic with glee -- interrupted your sentence to ask you if you'd read any of his other works; you replied that you had read The Pale King, and I made motions implying that I had as well while silently cursing myself for never finishing it, disappointed that you hadn't said The Broom of the System as I would have had far more impressive things to say about that one, but I couldn't dwell for very long since you were revealing that you had come to Claremont from hundreds of miles away to see the house in which he had died (725 Indian Hill Blvd. Claremont 91711 CA, I recited to myself), which he had written down in the -- and this we said at the same time, though you winced when it happened while I grinned -- "Author's Foreword." And now I was caught in a crude caricature of one of His infamous double-binds: I was swooning at the fact that you were of my breed, willing to journey far for a glimpse of where genius resided, and I wanted nothing more than to sit down at your table, abandon my previous life, and begin anew with you, and at the same moment I realized how violently I was bothering you, knowing that I would have felt just as perturbed if I had sat down in what seemed to be a nice enough place to get through a few more segments of the Difficult Novel I was reading only to be bombarded by interrogatives at the hand of an overzealously enthused food service worker. After I had finished speaking the few words I hadn't bothered to remain conscious of during my contemplation of the pros and cons of staying or leaving, I told you I would quote-unquote let you get back to it.

And I bid my adieu.

My dearest Reader, may I never see you again. For I can only hope that the thoughts spurred forth by the experience of consuming that Difficult Novel will lead you far, far, far away, far from any place that's near here. My dearest Reader, I can only hope that He can do for you what He did for me.

Sincerely,

Kevin Ryan Nava by Kevin Ryan Nava, 11

“Now, imagine having money at 25,” Kevin says, and he puts his hands out, palms out, to indicate this.

“Imagine having real money -- not just being stable, but being well-off. Imagine your nice job earns you enough money for a nice place and a nice car. You wear nice shirts and a nice watch to the nice dates you take your nice girlfriend on.

“Now imagine that this nice girl, who -- like you -- crossed the border illegally under threat of imprisonment, rape, and death, less than a decade before, imagine she says she loves you.”

His hands rise.

“Imagine the prospect of attaining a different dream, an American dream. An concessionary dream, if you will.

“A family,” his hands rise further, “in a cushy home in a safe neighborhood,” they rise further, “and an assured future.”

His hands are at face-level now.

“It’s not the dream you want, but it’s the dream you get.“

He exhales quietly.

“And then imagine you have no idea that the companies in which you’ve poured your savings are about to tank. Imagine you know nothing of a world that doesn’t need investment bankers. Imagine your nice girlfriend, now your fiancée, imagine her mental illness has yet to manifest. Imagine playing soccer on a field against men years younger and less agile than you, on a Wednesday you’ve taken off in the middle of March in sunny Southern California, and imagine you’re thinking that maybe sacrificing the only thing you ever really loved -- not loved enough, not the sort of semi-satisfying love that you held for your job and your soon-to-be wife, no, a real love fraught with fear and intoxication and repulsion and unbearable irrationality -- imagine you’re thinking that maybe exchanging passion for comfort wasn’t such a bad idea after all, if what you got was this. Imagine you think this -- this comfort, this ‘enough’ -- will last forever.

“Imagine you have no idea how wrong you are, and how fucked you’re about to be.”

His hands fall.

“So they decided to have a kid.”

Kevin Ryan Nava by Kevin Ryan Nava, 10

Kevin Ryan Nava always knew he wanted to be an artist.

His father, Victor, was one, once: a painter, and a poet, but primarily a musician. His mother, as well: another poet, and with a beautiful voice.

But, unlike Kevin’s, their works remain obscure. Somewhere in Peru float copies of his mother’s first and only LP. And someone somewhere else unknowingly owns a painting by his father.

Victor had been, for a long stint during his post-adolescence, a music student at UCLA, spending hours locked in the Department of Music’s practice rooms in between the occasional art class or afternoon spent dazedly composing. Less than three years after his first day of undergraduate schooling, he abandoned the endeavors in toto, opting instead for a double-major in applied economics and business management.

“He liked money,” Kevin says.

Victor had been working two full-time jobs while in school to help pay for his tuition, and at some point -- as Kevin relays -- he realized that he could the few extra dollars he kept for himself could grow exponentially -- so long as he left his dreams of being a rock star behind.

Kevin Ryan Nava by Kevin Ryan Nava, 9

And the other half?

He tilts his head. “The other half of what?”

His inspiration.

A beat. “Ah, oh, yes. The other half.”

He’s suddenly mulling, deeply, gone past where I can access, and I can tell this because his face contorts so violently when he departs. His brow is severely creased, his eyes down, the sound of his teeth gritting against each other nearly painful. The fingers on his right hand curve and stiffen. His nostrils flare.

When he begins to speak again, these facial transformations empty; his body relaxes into his chair, his voice assured. This is not the first of these drifty lapses, and it will not be the last.

“Because it gives me something to do with my hands. I’ve got antsy fucking hands, man. If I’m not wrist-deep in those globs of color...”

He smiles, and every part of his face joins in on the gesture when he does.

“Idle hands are the devil’s playthings,” and he says this and he’s still grinning, and this grin he’s giving me is sincere, it really is, he is absolutely serious when he regurgitates this flaccid platitude, and I almost wish to stand up in front of him and applaud, to cherish him audibly for his continued belief in this and the proverbs that so easily tumble out of his mouth over our time together. He believes the bullshit he expels, and he does so with such conviction, it’s laudable.

“Don’t be so cynical,” he says, and I realize my own facial contortions have given my reaction away.

Here, further differences.

Kevin Ryan Nava by Kevin Ryan Nava, 8

We're sitting on stools in his studio when I ask him about his inspiration, his raison de créer.

“There are two things that keep this, all of this--," he sweeps his arms around the room, "--going, and I discovered both only recently, in my opinion.

"When I was thirty-three, I owned one suit. That’s it. I wore the same suit to every interview, expecting that I’d buy more upon being hired somewhere. And I never was. Never once had I been hired for a job that required me to wear the suit on any other day but the interview. The number of uniforms I’ve worn...”

He shakes his head, laughs.

“Well, naturally, I hated the damn suit. It was too tight, too hot; it made me look grotesquely trapezoidal. And yet I loved it. It made me feel powerful, like I was wearing a disguise. Like I was presenting them Clark Kent, all the while secretly Superman. And the joy of knowing they couldn’t know. That I could have been anyone.

“But I wasn’t. After twelve years of wearing that infernal suit, after dozens of interviews, I awoke one melancholic morning and prepared myself as though I were going to just another. Instead, I sat down at a canvas, the canvas, a thirty-foot-wide imposing monster I’d bought years before for a small fortune.

“That was Terra. Got me recognized. I made enough from that painting to buy a whole wardrobe of suits.”

I’m about to ask him what this all has to do with my question, when he says:

“That’s one-half of my inspiration. The suits. I can’t create unless I’m wearing one. Unless I feel as though I am arriving at my job, at the greatest job I could ever hold, one for which I hired myself. I wear the suit to remind myself how fucking lucky I am to sustain myself from my artwork alone; so when I’m wearing it, I feel obligated to create. I keep creating, and I keep putting all of myself into it, because I feel as though my career is on the line when my performance flounders. Because it is.”

Kevin Ryan Nava by Kevin Ryan Nava, 7

You must know: this is not an autobiography. This is not Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, or Charlie Kauffman’s Adaptation. This is not an attempt to find myself by way of navel-gazing or self-fictionalizing, although it indeed began as such. Such narcissistic art reared him and myself, and the generation to which we share membership; this was art crafted by the postmodernists and deconstructionists of the period who believed in destroying and remolding the Author, the Self, the “character” named I. He, like most of the members of our shared generation, abandoned the gambit somewhere in the middle of college. I, like most out-of-work writers my age, did not.

When I set out to find myself, I had little faith that I would succeed: either a man who fit my parameters did not exist, or else he would be unsuitable for my purposes, for whatever reason. Too old, too young, too foreign, too similar, too reclusive, too annoying. From the onset, I was already concerned, and a backup plan formed: were I to find nothing, I would resort to my usual trope of full-on fabrication. A likeness askew, a tinted (tainted) mirror of myself, one which I could use (abuse) to reveal (to revel in) myself.

Had I gone down this route, I would have inevitably failed. I am not so talented a writer.\

I am barely a writer of any talent at all; my asset is persistence rather than elegance.

When I found him, and when he turned out to be nothing more than what he was, I employed this asset, my only one, and persisted, even when he turned out to be too similar (an artist less than a year younger than I), too foreign (he had not stepped foot in the States for almost twenty years), too reclusive (it took him months to agree to meet in person), and too annoying (when we finally did meet, his mannerisms were excruciating). 

The quality I recognized in him when I found him is the first of our similarities, or at the very least the first of them I found: we are both decidedly unremarkable.

I chose him once I found him not because he is any more or less interesting than I am, but precisely because he is neither. In this book, in this, his biography and not my auto-, neither of us must compete for the limelight because we are equally banal. And we all share in this banality, all of us. In my reflecting upon his life -- in my chronicling of his life and my attempt to chronicle it -- I discovered so very little about myself and instead so very much about everyone else.

Kevin Ryan Nava by Kevin Ryan Nava, 6

In my search, I had but one parameter: his name, in print, must look exactly like mine. So do our names match on most everything: driver’s licenses, college diplomas, published works (newspaper articles, gallery exhibitions, and anthologies, for us both), and most unofficial documents. Only do our passports and birth certificates differ, the former being used nearly annually by him and rarely by myself, and the latter being the true beginnings of our differences.

KEVIN              RYAN              NAVA

and

KEVIN RYAN              MALDONADO              NAVA

Close enough.

Kevin Ryan Nava by Kevin Ryan Nava, 5

Here, our first differences, or at least the first of them I find in my search for him. Kevins abound in America, as do Navas, somewhat unsurprisingly. In the 60’s, when his father and mother were children, in Michoacan, Mexico and Lima, Peru, respectively, Kevin was one of the most common names in America. Then -- to them, as it was to so many who did not yet live there -- the country was hope. To my own father and mother, who in the 60’s were residents of Nevada and borne to proud supporters of one Richard Milhous Nixon, the country was an utter shitshow. They surely had a friend or two with my name, perhaps even a good friend later forgotten but whose kindness stuck, subconsciously, and became my namesake. If his parents knew anyone with either of his first names, they were foreigners, or else children of overzealous parents, labeled with hispanicized versions: Keven, or Rian.

“If my parents’d opted for one of those bastardizations, I’d be a whole other fucking person,” he says.

Kevin Ryan Nava by Kevin Ryan Nava, 3

Kevin Ryan Nava was born to insecure parents after a gruesome twenty-six hour labor that concluded in the performance of a Caesarian section. His father, Victor Jacinto Nava, held the hand of his mother, Magaly Castro Maldonado, as she screamed when Dr. Geneva Joan Herst, whom they had met less than a day earlier, finally made a midline longitudinal incision across Magaly’s abdomen, which Magaly had refused to allow for the preceding half-day, after it had become clear Kevin was not going to be an easy birth. The cut allowed Geneva and her team of nurses enough space to pull Kevin from Magaly’s uterus and expose the ears of all in the room to his first scream, so piercing it drowned out even the exasperated yelps of his mother, which turned into panting sighs, and then placid silence, as Geneva placed Kevin into Magaly’s arms.

Magaly smiled.

They all did.

Kevin Ryan Nava by Kevin Ryan Nava, 2

My name is his name. His name is mine.

Neither of us is more important than the other; in fact we are most likely equally important in that neither of us matter, as none of us do. My only claim to greatness is this endeavor, my attempt to delineate how two lives have converged and diverged, refracted and diffracted. He makes no such claim, and he is better off for it, for this endeavor was fruitless, with regards to my own ends. I am none the wiser about where I veered too far to the left, or to the right, or ran too quickly or too slowly, or didn’t move at all. In searching for someone who shared my unusual name, I found not an alternate version of me, nor a better version of me (although I do not believe that is what I sought anyway), but instead another human being, entirely separate from myself, with whom I merely happened to share insecure parents and a propensity for creative expression.

I may as well have chosen anybody.

I may as well have chosen everybody.

Kevin Ryan Nava by Kevin Ryan Nava, 1

How I came to be writing this is I decided to find another me.

How he came to be written about is I found him.

He was born in California, on a sixth of May, after his mother had been in labor for twenty-six hours, ten years before two planes crashed into a pair of twin towers in New York on what would be his mother’s thirty-seventh birthday.

This is but a reference point.

Another reference point:

Five years prior to his expulsion from the womb, a nuclear power plant accident released so much radiation into the atmosphere that its effects persist even today.

Another:

A few months after his stepfather returned from his second tour in Afghanistan, he spent his fourteenth Christmas in a studio apartment while over two hundred thousand people perished in a tsunami nearly ten thousand miles away.

And another:

Twelve months after his grandmother’s birth, and twenty-six years before he was conceived, nuclear bombs nicknamed Little Boy and Fat Man were deployed upon two Asian cities, the effects of which would kill more people than the aforementioned tsunami.

This is but context, for him and for myself. I am similarly connected, as we all are, to these horrors. How tenuous our connections to them are, and yet:

How intimate...

Harvey Cleckley's The Mask of Sanity [claims] that there is a kind of evildoer called a psychopath, who does not seem in any way abnormal or different from other people but in fact suffers from "a grave psychiatric disorder," whose chief symptom is the very appearance of normality by which the horror of his condition is obscured. For behind "the mask of sanity" there is not a real human being but a mere simulacrum of one.

[But] the concept of the psychopath... evades the problem it purports to solve. To say that people who do bad things don't seem bad is to say something we all already know: no one flaunts bad behavior, everyone tries to hide it, every villain wears a mask of goodness.

The concept of the psychopath is, in fact, an admission of failure to solve the mystery of evil -- it is merely a restatement of the mystery.

from Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer